Journal of Legal Anthropology

This article offers insights into the subjectivities that emerge as patients negotiate treatment modalities in Norwegian opioid substitution treatment (OST). In the accounts, I explore patients’ growing engagements with legal imaginaries, and highlight the transformative powers of the law, to develop a concept of the legal self. The analysis shows the power of the law in an imagination of harm and the ways in which the law impacts social and personal change. In the ethnographic insights into the legal structures as a landscape of possibilities for disadvantaged groups, I illustrate the interstices between legal consciousness and mobilisation. This allows for and adds a new dimension to the concept of patienthood beyond the strictly medical experience in which legal narratives provide frames by which people construct meanings for their lived experiences. I consider an examination of both the effectiveness and the effects of the law as crucial for studies of citizenship.

This article concerns the relationship between motorcycle taxi drivers in Kigali and the legal frameworks that govern their business. While motorcyclists commonly subvert legal processes, or avoid complying with regulations, this should not be understood in terms of their ‘resistance’ to legal orders. To do so would imply that laws are imposed on their social lives from without; however, I show how illegalities help to structure social life by creating ‘mistakes’ that are the basis of social relations. I argue that motorcyclists do not confront legal orders in the idiom of resistance, but neither are they determined or shaped directly by legality. Rather, partially formed by breaches of rules, law is integral to their lives, shaping them indirectly or tangentially, according to the relationships and connections ‘mistakes’ with respect to law enable. Law regulates life not by encoding its rules, but by allowing certain kinds of relationships to form.

The local uptake of new media in the Middle East is shaped by deep histories of imperialism, state building, resistance and accommodation. In contemporary Jordan, social media is simultaneously encouraging identification with tribes and undermining their gerontocratic power structures. Senior men stress their own importance as guarantors (‘faces’), who restore order following conflicts, promising to pay their rivals a large surety if their kin break the truce. Yet, ‘cutting the face’ (breaking truces) remains an alternative, one often facilitated by new technologies that allow people to challenge pre-existing structures of communication and authority. However, the experiences of journalists and other social media mavens suggest that the liberatory promise of the new technology may not be enough to prevent its reintegration into older patterns of social control.

In The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, the International Criminal Court (ICC) tried the destruction of UNESCO World Heritage sites as a war crime for the first time. In this case, the value of things in relation to the value of persons became the central issue. Based on courtroom ethnography conducted during the proceedings and informed by affect and emotion research, this article identifies the rhetorical practice of sentimentalising persons and things as an important process of legal meaning making. Through sentimentalising, all parties rhetorically produce normative arrangements of bodies by way of emotionally differentiating the relevant persons, things and other entities from and affectively relating them to each other. Sentimentalising provides an affective-emotional frame in which to determine the degree of guilt and innocence, justice and injustice.